‘Car’s coming in now,’ he said. ‘Olive-green Mercedes, nineteen-sixty-two. Registration XPQI89Q.’
‘All right, Mike, I don’t want to buy it.’
As the wheels crunched on the drive and someone opened one of the nearside doors, Burden ducked his head.
‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘She is something of a dish.’
A woman in white slacks stepped out of the car and strolled to the foot of the steps. The kingfisher-blue and darker-blue patterned silk scarf that held back her red hair matched her shirt. Burden thought she was beautiful, although her face was hard, as if the tanned skin was stretched on a steel frame. He was paid not to admire but to observe. For him the most significant thing about her was that her mouth was painted not brownish pink but a clear golden-red. He turned away from the window and heard her say loudly: ‘I am sick to my stomach of bleeding kids! I bet you anything you like, Pete, that lousy little Inge isn’t back yet.’
A key was turned in the front-door lock and Burden heard Inge Wolff running along the hall to meet her employers. One of the children was crying.
‘Policemen? How many policemen? Oh, I don’t believe it, Inge. Where’s their car?’
‘I suppose they want me, Helen. You know I’m always leaving the Merc outside without lights.’
In the drawing-room Wexford grinned.
The door opened suddenly, bouncing back from one of the flower-vases as if it had been kicked by a petulant foot. The red-haired woman came in first. She was wearing sunglasses with rhinestone frames, and although the sun had gone and the room was dim, she didn’t bother to take them off. Her husband was tall and big, his face bloated and already marked with purple veins. His long shirt-tails hung, over his belly like gross maternity smock. Burden winced at its design of bottles and glasses and plates on a scarlet and white checkerboard.
He and Wexford got up.
‘Mrs Missal?’
‘Yes, I’m Helen Missal What the hell do you want?’
‘We’re police officers, Mrs Missal, making enquiries in connection with the disappearance of Mrs Margaret Parsons.’
Missal stared his fat lips were already wet, but still he licked them.
‘Won’t you sit down,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine why you want to talk to my wife.’
‘Neither can I,’ Helen Missal said. ‘What is this, a police state?’
‘I hope not, Mrs Missal. I believe you bought a new lipstick on Tuesday morning?’
‘So what? Is it a crime?’
‘If you could just show me that lipstick, madam, I shall be quite satisfied and we won’t take up any more of your time. I’m sure you must be tired after a day at the seaside.’
‘You can say that again.’ She smiled. Burden thought she suddenly seemed at the same time more wary and more friendly. ‘Have you ever sat on a spearmint ice lolly?’ She giggled and pointed to a very faint bluish-green stain on the seat of her trousers. ‘Thank God for Inge! I don’t want to see those little bastards again tonight.’
‘Helen!’ Missal said.
‘The lipstick, Mrs Missal.’
‘Oh, yes, the lipstick. Actually I did buy one, a filthy colour called Arctic something. I lost it in the cinema last night.’
‘Are you quite sure you lost it in the cinema? Did you enquire about it? Ask the manager, for instance?’
‘What, for an eight-and-sixpenny lipstick? Do I look that poor? I went to the cinema - ’
‘By yourself, madam?’
‘Of course I went by myself.’ Burden sensed a certain defensiveness, but the glasses masked her eyes. ‘I went to the cinema and when I got back the lipstick wasn’t in my bag.’
‘Is this it?’ Wexford held the lipstick out on his palm, and Mrs Missal extended long fingers with nails lacquered silver like armour-plating. ‘I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to come down to the station with me and have your fingerprints taken.’
‘Helen, what is this?’ Missal put his hand on his wife’s arm. She shook it off as if the fingers had left a dirty mark. ‘I don’t get it, Helen. Has someone pinched your lipstick, someone connected with this woman?
She continued to look at the lipstick in her hand. Burden wondered if she realized she had already covered it with prints.
‘I suppose it is mine,’ she said slowly. ‘All right, I admit it must be mine. Where did you find it, in the cinema?’
‘No, Mrs Missal. It was found on the edge of a wood just off the Pomfret Road.’
‘What?’ Missal jumped up. He stared at Wexford, then at his wife. ‘Take those damn’ things off!’ he shouted and twitched the sunglasses from her nose. Burden saw that her eyes were green, a very light bluish green flecked with gold. For a second he saw panic there; then she dropped her lids, the only shields that remained to her, and looked down into her lap.
‘You went to the pictures,’ Missal said. ‘You said you went to the pictures. I don’t get this about a wood and the Pomfret Road. What the hell’s going on?’
Helen Missal said very slowly, as if she was inventing:
‘Someone must have found my lipstick in the cinema. Then they must have dropped it. That’s it. It’s quite simple. I can’t understand what all the fuss is about.’
‘It so happens,’ Wexford said, ‘that Mrs Parsons was found strangled in that wood at half past one today.’
She shuddered and gripped the arms of her chair. Burden thought she was making a supreme effort not to cry out. At last she said:
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Your murderer, whoever he is, pinched my lipstick and then dropped it at the . . . the scene of the crime.’
‘Except,’ Wexford said, ‘that Mrs Parsons died on Tuesday. I won’t detain you any longer, madam. Not just at present. One more thing, though, have you a car of your own?’
‘Yes, yes, I have. A red Dauphine. I keep it in the other garage with the entrance in the Kingsbrook Road. Why?
‘Yes, why?’ Missal said. ‘Why all this? We didn’t even know this Mrs Parsons. You’re not suggesting my wife . . . My God, I wish someone would explain!’
Wexford looked from one to the other. Then he got up. ‘I’d just like to have a look at the tires, sir,’ he said. As he spoke light seemed suddenly to have dawned on Missal. He blushed an even darker brick red and his face crumpled like that of a baby about to cry. There was despair there, despair and the kind of pain Burden felt he should not look upon. Then Missal seemed to pull himself together. He said in a quiet reserved voice that seemed to cover a multitude of unspoken enquiries and accusations:
‘I’ve no objection to your looking at my wife’s car but I can’t imagine what connection she has with this woman.’
‘Neither can I, sir,’ Wexford said cheerfully. ‘That’s what we shall want to find out. I’m as much in the dark as you are.’
‘Oh, give him the garage key, Pete,’ she said. ‘I tell you I don’t know any more. It’s not my fault if my lipstick was stolen.’
‘I’d give a lot to be able to hide behind those rhododendrons and hear what he says to her,’ Wexford said as they walked up the Kingsbrook Road to Helen Missal’s garage.
‘And what she says to him,’ Burden said. ‘You think it’s all right leaving them for the night, sir? She’s bound to have a current passport.’
Wexford said innocently: ‘I thought that might worry you, Mike, so I’m going to book a room at The Olive and Dove for the night. A little job for Martin. He’ll have to sit up all night. My heart bleeds for him.’
The Missals’ garden was large and roughly diamond-shaped. On the north side, the side where the angle of the diamond was oblique, the garden was bounded by the Kingsbrook, and on the other a hedge of tamarisk separated it from the Kingsbrook Road. Burden unlocked the cedar-wood gates to the garage and made a note of the index number of Helen Missal’s car. Its rear window was almost entirely filled by a toy tiger cub.